Panic Training
Panic is one of the most common and debilitating issues that brings clients to therapy. Often it overlaps with other presenting issues such as phobia, OCD, trauma, and grief. PESI UK offers neuroscience-informed courses to help you alleviate the symptoms of panic, address emotional roots, and reverse creeping avoidance that can constrict clients’ lives and see panic attacks become a panic disorder. Taught by the field's most respected panic and anxiety experts, including Catherine Pittman, PhD, HSPP, Kimberly Morrow, LCSW, and Elizabeth DuPont Spencer, MSW, LCSW-C our courses offer skills in CBT, ERP, mindfulness and techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation. Whether you are developing your confidence to respond to panic attacks, or ready to deepen your skills with a certification, our trainings will help you harness the power of neuroplasticity and reduce the grip of panic on clients’ lives.
Popular Online Panic Training
Why Panic Happens—And Why Your Interventions Work
The Neuroscience of Panic
Panic disorder is a brain and body problem. Understanding the neuroscience behind it doesn't just help you explain it to clients; it determines which interventions you reach for and why.
At the center of the panic response is the amygdala, the brain's threat-detection system. When a client has a panic attack, the amygdala has misfired, classifying a harmless internal sensation (a slight increase in heart rate, a brief dizziness) as a genuine emergency. The resulting alarm cascade, adrenaline, accelerated heart rate, hyperventilation, and derealization produce exactly the physical sensations the client is already afraid of, intensifying the cycle.
The key neurological concept for panic treatment is interoceptive conditioning: the brain has learned to associate neutral bodily sensations with the panic response. Even a tiny physiological change can trigger fear automatically, before the client can think their way out of it.
This is why reassurance doesn't work. It is also why the most effective treatments for panic disorder don't reduce arousal; they change the client's learned relationship with it.
Interoceptive exposure deliberately and predictably induces the feared physical sensations in session, dizziness from head rolling, breathlessness from breathing through a narrow straw, heart racing from brief exercise, so that clients learn, experientially, that the sensations themselves are not dangerous. This breaks the conditioning that drives the panic cycle.
Cognitive restructuring targets the catastrophic interpretations that amplify sensations into perceived emergencies. Clients learn to revise their anxiety narratives: from "I'm having a heart attack" to "This is discomfort—not danger."
Combined with systematic avoidance reduction and an understanding of how the amygdala and cortex each contribute to panic, clinicians have a complete, neuroscience-grounded treatment framework that produces lasting results.